Brief candles

I am feeling giddy at the moment.

I commented in a previous post that “The only school of “alternative” thought which I have not yet found to be intellectually undermined is the Buddhist approach to re-incarnation” and Anticant obligingly provided me with an antidote. I’ve been reading “Reincarnation: A Critical Examination” by Paul Edwards on and off since it arrived.

I’ve always thought a Hereafter was at least possible, and for a lot of my adult life I’ve considered it to be probable. There’s internal coherence to the Hindu and Buddhist world views, but they fall down when you test some of their underlying assumptions using nasty practical empirical science. (The one world-view that has never made any sense to me whatsoever is paradise, judgement day, heaven and hell). So during my adult life, my position on life after death veered from the conclusion that reincarnation made absolute sense to dragging it along like a comfort blankie while I got on with my real life. I think I even put Buddhist down on the 2001 census. I certainly wasn’t going to put Jedi.

I like Buddhism. I like its practicality. The techniques it teaches, such as meditation, produce real quantifiable changes in the people who practice them. I like the idea of the soul taking several lifetimes to explore different things. I like the idea of karma, that every action has a consequence and that you cannot escape the consequences of your acts. (This is very different from the judgement / punishment view of Christianity, where there is an external deity keeping score. Karma as consequences is more mechanistic and simpler, like a law of nature rather than the whim of a petulant despot). I look around me and I can see karma working on a small scale, and I was comforted by the idea that it worked across lifetimes too. I like the idea that I chose my own parents, that I might get a second chance with lost loves, that I might yet be a mother, that I can catch up next time with what I don’t do this time. I’ll miss Buddhism, but oddly enough I am more interested in it now, not less.

Buddhism, or a Buddhisty theory of reincarnation, provided answers to the questions that I asked, and the aforementioned comfort blankie of course.

Edwards argues simply and fairly clearly that:

1. there is no credible evidence for reincarnation and even the best cases evaporate into delusion, wishful thinking or fraud under close examination
2. the mind requires the brain to exist, and consciousness does not survive the death of the brain

Edwards also deals with things like Near Death Experiences, (feelings of warmth, love and total understanding, culturally specific spiritual figure at the end of a tunnel of light, etc); Astral Travel (which he debunks as bunk); remembered past lives, (which never produce information not available in this one), and so on.

Ultimately, of course, it comes down to a matter of belief, but religion is essentially a ritualised version of “here be dragons” and as science maps out more and more of the unknown, the remaining dragons are left balancing on smaller and smaller islands. Edwards argues that the dragon of reincarnation no longer has a foot to stand on. Being an Oriental Dragon, it has no wings and cannot fly. Or that’s my metaphor, and I’m sticking to it.

I am trying to absorb various truths. When I die, I’ll go out like a candle. There are no second chances, if I don’t do it this time then I won’t get to do it at all. The people who I know who’ve died have stopped. And the big one: life really is a bitch and then you really do die.

As well as the truths, I now have all sorts of other questions swirling in my mind. How can morality have merit if it is merely a human artefact? What practical meaning remains to the word “spirituality”? What merit is left in Buddhism if you take out reincarnation? Does this mean the Dalai Lama isn’t cool any more?

Oddly there is one question I am pretty clear on which is why are there no pre-20th century cultures which are entirely irreligious?

It seems clear to me:

1. that religions provided creation myths and an explanation for why stuff happened and
2. that religious belief provides just enough of an advantage to individuals and societies in times of crisis for there to have been a very slight selective advantage in a strong religious faith.

Dawkins is such an evangelist for atheism that I rather like the idea of religion providing an evolutionary benefit. It seems highly likely to me that dogs have gods.

At the moment I veer between two contradictory feelings. Sometimes I am shocked by how dramatically the stakes have been raised: as the the saying goes, “there ain’t no justice, just us”. We cannot rely on any external checks and balances to iron out the world’s problems. If we don’t sort it out here and now, then it won’t be sorted out, and that’s not all right. And then I veer towards nihilism: in the long run we are all dead and nothing is remembered. How can justice matter if the victims can neither know nor care?

It is this spinning around which is making me giddy.

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Edwards’ book, incidentally, is irritating in a number of ways. It is printed on very odd paper and the whole thing turns into two parallel tubes when you are reading it. It is appallingly badly proof-read, which is unforgivable in a second edition. He promises to discuss various subjects such as childhood prodigies and extremes of talent, but doesn’t, and he fails to discuss Out of Body experiences at all, refering the reader in toto to Susan Blackmore. It is however also fun, witty and sarcastic. I just wish it had been better edited. Or edited at all, really.

Shagging the Tudors and Stuarts

While I’m having a go at the Scots, I am going to settle down and have a thoroughly good bitch about Mary Queen of.

I have finally pinned down what annoys me about Mary Stuart-Darnley-Bothwell or whatever her surname was. Some people are ruled by their heads, some are ruled by their hearts and some do all their thinking with organs that are slightly lower down, and I suspect Mary Stuart was one of these. There are lots of good things about having a powerful libido, however far too many women whose cognitive abilities have been washed away by their hormones deny that they have a strong sex drive and present themselves as being sensitive, emotional or romantic, because it’s nicer than being a hot babe. Their admirers describe them as ‘passionate’ though that’s often no more than a polite euphemism. In fact many of them are drama queens, and the rest of them are just plain needy because all they want to do is buck like rabbits but they can’t face the implications, so they wrap their lust up in pink bows and say that they are longing for a relationship. As I said, Mary Stuart’s series of overly-emotional and frequently disastrous marriages suggest to me that she came into this category of self-indulgent and rather precious women.

If we look at Elizabeth we find a much cooler customer. Whether or not Elizabeth bedded her various favourites is a matter of speculation but whatever her sexual history she didn’t for a moment get off on the emotion of it all. She sometimes comes across as ruthless and cold-hearted, but in fact I think it is simply that she had a very strong survival instinct, honed by the extreme precariousness of her upbringing as the sometime illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII. Elizabeth could never afford to put a hair wrong; her mother had been executed while Elizabeth was still an infant and she had veered from heir to bastard and back again depending on the political and religious inclinations of her father and siblings. Whatever other speculations you make about Elizabeth’s sexuality and gender, it is quite clear that personal survival was a primary goal.

Mary by contrast was raised as the golden little darling of the French court, feted, spoiled and flattered, and never developed any of the survival instincts which Elizabeth learned as a toddler. Maybe Mary didn’t need them, maybe she was just incapable of developing them. Mary comes across as emotionally self-indulgent and short term: Liz Taylor to Elizabeth’s Katherine Hepburn.

It is probably unfair of me to admire Elizabeth’s self-control and dislike to what I see as Mary’s self-indulgence, but women who wail about love and betrayal when all they want is a good shag scrape on my nerves like chalk on a blackboard. If you want a good shag, go out and shag someone.

Right. That’s the Scots insulted. Again. I’m off to read up about Owain Glyndwr now.

Mr Red and Mr Blue and the Other Boot

I’ve already blogged about the fact that I feel distinctly uneasy working without a Plan B.

Management texts define a Project as a complex one-off activity and a Process as a repeatable one. I have put it to Mr Red, who’s my boss, that no-one chez nous has previously done the work we’re are doing, that there are lots of places where it can go wrong and that therefore it qualifies as a Project. I won’t bore you with the scope of the thing, but I do tend to win “my roll-out is bigger than your roll-out” discussions with former colleagues at the Geek Reunion Ball.

Anyway, it isn’t being managed as a Project and we don’t have any contingency plans if things go wrong except “work out what to do at the time”. We are a bloody minded bunch so it’s an approach that will work, but it takes so much effort to make it up as I go along. I’d much rather implement a plan I made earlier. Maybe I just watched too much Blue Peter as a child.

I have been predicting doom and gloom like the dour Scottish one from Dad’s Army, and reminding my team that people always over-promise and under-deliver, and being told on a daily basis “Aphra, you are so cynical”. Well, cynical or not, I’m also right. Ner.

We are in fact only one week behind where I expected to be, which is a month behind where the rest of the team expected to be, all because other people over-promised and under-delivered and we believed them instead of tracking their status on a daily basis. I may be cynical, but Mr Red told me not to be anal, and now look at us.

All of that as it may be, I have spent the last 8 weeks waiting for Something to Go Wrong. Now that it has, I feel an enormous sense of relief. We have no choice now but to deal with reality. No more floating around in pretty-fluffy-cuckoo-land where people do what they say they do without being checked up on and software tests perfect the first time through.

I am thinking of having a motivational poster printed up saying:

People lie.

 

Software fails.

 

Deal with it.

Victorian Windows – cooler than cool things

Every now and again one comes across something which is so well thought through and executed it fills one with astonished pleasure. Recently I came across a window which delighted me in this way. I guess the carpenter who made it could have done so any time between Waterloo and Suez, say the early 1800s to the 1950s, but if you ask me it was probably late Victorian.

It appeared to be a perfectly normal sash window, if a little small. You lugged it vertically upwards to open it, and the reason it didn’t fall down again was because it was counterbalanced by hidden weights on the ends of pulleys. So far, so traditional.

Then I noticed a little spring-loaded brass handle on the right hand upright.

“Odd” I thought. And pulled the handle to open the panel. As one would.

I opened it and thought about it. It looked as if I should be able to move the window sash towards me, but to do that there’d need to be hinges on the other side and a way of disentangling the rope and the pulley, and of course there couldn’t be hinges, because hinges connecting it to the left hand upright would prevent any vertical movement.

So I looked at the left hand upright. There were hinged catches on the upright, and protruding screws on the sash…

…and if you caught the screws in the catches, lo and behold, you had hinges.

Ok. So we have a sash window which is designed to go up and down but this particular sash window can also be opened on its hinges like a casement window,which is fairly cool. However the rope and pulley on the right hand side at the top prevent this.

So I tried anyway, first lifting the hidden weight on its rope so that it wasn’t pulling on the sash, and the sash opened towards me like a casement. And then I discovered that the rope could easily be removed from the sash because the upright of the sash was channeled out to accomodate the rope, and the rope had an aglet on the end with a keyhole shaped hole and another prodruding screw to catch it.

When I removed the rope from the catch, the window opened towards me freely like a casement and I could, if I so desired, have cleaned it on both sides.

Now I know that modern double glazed units achieve the same sort of effect by using levers to engage and disengage two sets of internal hinges, but this is a wooden window almost certainly made over a hundred years ago. It is also absolutely the first time I’ve come across something like this in a window of that age, and as you can tell, I pay attention to windows.

It delighted me when I found it, and it delights me still.

An Englishman, a Scotsman and a Viking lurch out of a bar

Jedburgh Abbey is a seriously impressive ruin; it’s a skeleton with all the soft parts dissected away. No distracting stained glass, no inappropriate Victorian pews or 1950s wooden chairs, no organ loft, no banners or hangings, just the raw engineering of the stone.

I was chatting to one of the blokes who sells you tickets and said how impressive it was, he said “until you English destroyed it”. Now, there is so much more to the Scots than you’d ever think from the whingeing victim status some of them adopt in relation to the English that I get mightily irritated whenever one of them comes over all Braveheart and Bonnie Prince Charlie and Highland Clearances on me. I smiled very sweetly and said “oh, it wasn’t personal you know, we English are just a bunch of football hooligans, we’ve trashed all sorts of things all over the world not just here in Scotland”.

Personally I blame the Danes. Don’t get me wrong, I like Danes immensely: I enjoy their ironic sense of humour, I am awestruck that they have vending machines selling pornography in the street, I admire their elegant visual style, and I love their company.

Some years ago I worked for one who warned me that I should never pick a fight with a Dane because the Danes are descended from Vikings. I pointed out a flaw in his logic: England’s where all the roughtiest toughtiest Vikings went raping and pillaging and Denmark was where the stay-at-home ones stayed at home. (It amazes me sometimes that I’ve never been a victim of ABH. My Grandma used to warn me that I was so sharp I’d cut myself.)

You see, it’s always seemed to me that if you strip away all the padding and propaganda from the English character, we boil down to a bunch of drunken football hooligans falling out of the pub and picking pointless fights and suddenly all sorts of things fall into place from the treatment of the Celtic Nations to Elizabeth’s Sea Dogs to the British Empire.

Personally, I think that “I predict a riot” should replace the Godsave as the English National Anthem. In the words of the Kaiser Chiefs:

Watching the people get lairy
It’s not very pretty I tell thee
Walking through town is quite scary

Aphra Warhol

I should get out more:

There must be a website somewhere that does this sort of thing automatically, but I did it the in the free photo software that came with my PC, and feckin’ ages it took me too. I don’t really like it that much either, though I did find it more interesting and much harder than I expected.

Needing being needed

When does being supportive slip into co-dependency?

My Grandma, who had a large part in my raising, was born to a well off middle class family in the 19th Century. The role of womanhood which she presented was to help and support her men-folk and I imbibed co-dependency with my morning cereals. On the other hand I also learned that although men are loud and shouty and useful for heavy lifting, they aren’t necessarily that bright and in fact it takes a woman to understand the subtleties.

I emerged from my up-bringing believing myself very capable, thinking that men only see half the picture, and believing it is appropriate for me to enable my partner to Do His Work. Grandma acknowledged that the Work men Do is often Important, even if it is lopsided and frequently misses the point. On the other hand, she sent her daughter to university and certainly we grand-daughters were expected to enter professions rather than get jobs, so maybe she was a seething mass of feminist frustration all along but being a five year old, I didn’t notice. She could certainly be very impatient with men. Her motto was “‘I’ll do it myself’, said the Little Red Hen”, and my problem with feminism has always been to question why women should lower themselves to equality.

Now, whenever I get into a relationship, I can end up putting myself out to enable my partner to Do His Work. I do it consciously, I do it sparingly, and I tend to do it when it really does make a difference. However, I have previously been supportive of partners to my own emotional, financial or professional detriment. I am rougher and tougher than I used to be, and have much firmer boundaries, but the instincts to be supportive are still there.

What I struggle with, is whether or not it is a Bad Thing.

More self-indulgent trossachs

I dearly love the perfect present. I dearly love those occasions when you see something on a shelf in a shop and it whispers to you “I’m David’s” and you just have to buy it and give it to David even if you haven’t seen David for ages and he lives on the other side of the country. Well, I don’t know any Davids, but I did see some rather nifty doodads in a shop about six weeks ago and I was finally able to unite them with their natural owner on Wednesday. I thought they were blue ones, but they may have been yellow. Or blue. See what you think. This is what he does with them

Stats tart

Recently one of my MTAS posts has been topping my stats chart. It turns out that it is being sought out by scat-seekers because I had illustrated it with a stolen picture of a turd. Who’d have thought if you put “poop” into Google Images you’d get a link to a post giving my opinions of Ms Hewitt.

Satisfying though it is, I’ve renamed the picture “MTAS” and hopefully the scat-seekers will eventually go away. It pleases me to think that some may do what I did, nick the picture and use it elsewhere, and that eventually a search for “MTAS” will produce a picture of a heap of shit.

Nell is a jobbie

You see, I rather like graffiti. I know it’s supposed to be vandalism but I can’t get my head around that. Yes, spray paint on the roof of the Sistine Chapel would most definitely be vandalism but let’s face it, planning departments commit acts of desecration all the time.

I should work this up into a full-on essay putting the case for graffiti. I’ll mull the subject over I promise you because it is one that I do have definite opinions on. In the meantime here is a favourite piece from a car park in Fort William which I like for its concise, childish elegence and because the name is so middle-class. The boat is a pictorial bonus.